Workmen's advocate., 1887-03-05
THE TRUE PLAN OF SOCIAL
 REFORM.
BY nR. A DON Al.

A great number of social reformers have, during the last nineteen hundred i years nay, even further back in history, tried to bansh human misery and to improve society. Beginning with GdH- dama, PythdgoraS, Pluto, Jesus Christ, we may mention the names of 1homds Nor0S, Mobly, Mo,~Ily, BaboeI, St. Si0ton, FoU'ier Cadd U'dHlNg Proud hon and many more, as those of social reformers, who attempted to render mankind free, happier and better through agitation and instruction, but left the great question and task they un dortook unsolved. 1t may well be doubted whether the condition of q ma jority of mankind, even within the civil ized world, was ever so unhappy, so lit tie free and so low in a moral point of view as it is at present,
 Why is it that the celebrated men who undertook their plans of reform, have not succeeded? Is it not because they imagined that teaching and preaching could reform society? Valuable, nay, indispensable, are truths which are taught and preached. But their effect is slow and insignificant unless aided and supported by the material progress of mankind, or--as it may be called-by necessities of the development of natural forces Slavery could not be abolished, nor ever was abolished before it ceased to be necessary for the support of a class that cultivated sciences and arts and the political administration, or~,ln other words-before it became positive him | drance to material progress. The feudal 1 institutions of the Middle Age with their servitude of the agricultural class and their endless regulations of manufac- lures and commerce was necessary and in its way beneficial, until they became an intoerable,, nuisance, .an Obstacle to the material progress of society. The present mode of capitalistic production will not be abolished before it bat1les all its own purposes and life-Iaws by so inn poverisEing the working class of all the civilized nations that they cannot any longer pay for the consumption of the means of life which they have them selves produced, or before there is a standstill of production itself which can be ended only by employing mode of production and consumption.
 We must call ''Utopas" all plans of social reform which depend solely upon teaching and preaching social truths, and upon the expectation that their pie lures of happier state of society which might be realized by universal co-opera- to reform themselves and thus reform society. Although the name of Utopia came into existence first through the book of Thomas Moore, entitled "Utopia" the Utopist who preached Il heavenly kingdom on earth. had preceded him for thousands of years and their follow CTS were even more numerous in the three centuries after his death. There was not one of the social reformers be fore Karl Marx who was not a Utopist, and the Greenbackers, many Knights of Labor, and the anarchists, not to men 
 tion great number of ''cranks," are Utopists even now They all imagined and imagine even now, that they can convert mankind into accepting uni versal remedy for all social miserv-a remedy of their own invention. The very great number different panareas suggested is nowadays He obstacle to introducing some of their recipes which are rnobiectionable and may or will he. adopted when occasion therefor appears.
 Since we have learned that the work of social reform goes on, in spite of all ef- forts to the contrary, by natural forces which we may support by working i'll their direction, but cannot successfully counteract, it is at last time to give up Utopias and to inquire after the natural forces and laws which propel society on- warL. We hope to make these forces and laws ineligible through some few short articles which are to follow ill the succeeding numbers Of this paper.